Author Archives: Ennis Singh Mutinywale

Pirate or Marathi admiral?

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Since today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day (y)aarr, I wanted to blog about Kanhoji Angre, an African–Indian who became the most powerful “pirate” of his era in the world:

Yaarrrrrr

Kanhoji … Angira[‘s] …operations off the west coast of India developed into what was probably the most successful piracy endeavor of the 17th or 18th century. [Link]

He was the first pirate who dared to extort money from Indian and British shipping. In 1712 he seized the armed yacht of the East India Company’s governor and held it for a sizeable ransom. Several years later he repelled the British … using specially built gunships. His success drew pirates from India and Europe and by the 1720’s his captains commanded hundreds of well-armed vessels. By 1722 his repeated humiliations of the Company led to their cessation of attempts to destroy Kanhoji. [Link]

While Kanhoji is considered a pirate by the western world, he’s a national hero in India. The Indian Navy named a major naval base after him, and a memorial was due to be erected in his honor in Alibag. In the Indian narrative, he is “the great Admiral of Marathas,” Shivaji’s naval commander:

British historians have described Kanhoji Angre as a pirate, ignoring that he was appointed by the Maratha king. [Link]
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… finish last

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I’ve known for a while that India does poorly in the Olympics, but I had never realized exactly how poorly:

The world’s second most populous nation … ranks dead last worldwide in the number of Olympic medals won per capita. Paraguay, Niger and Iraq have done better. [Link]

This statistic seems to only count countries that have won at least one medal, which leaves India better off than countries without medals, but that’s slim consolation.

Now it may be unfair to compare medals on a per capita basis since that pits India against countries much smaller in population size and Olympic winnings are hard to scale up. However, even if you look at the two largest countries in the world, China has won over 100 times as many medals as India in the past few decades:

Since 1984, when China rejoined the Olympic Games after decades of isolation, the Asian superpower has won 320 medals. India, its political and economic rival, has won three… [Link]

And in a century of Olympics, India has won just 16 medals (fewer than that other nation of a billion, China, typically wins at a single [sic] Games) and only eight in the last 50 years. [Link]

But, you object, China has a communist-era olympic medal factory which even tries to breed athletes. Fair enough, but even amongst Commonwealth countries in general, India lags so far behind that the officials of the Commonwealth Games have scolded India for not doing enough to avoid embarrassment when it next hosts the games in 2010 [Link]. No matter how you cut it, India is at the bottom of sporting countries worldwide.

It is true that India does better in some sports than in others, but India’s best sports all require little physical exertion:

“India is doing very well in chess. And pretty well at cue sports like billiards and snooker. And for the past couple of years, Indian golfers have done very well on the Asian circuit…” [Link]
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Betting on Brown for the Booker?

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Literary bettors rejoice for the shortlist for the 2007 (Man) Booker prize is out. Last year, Kiran Desai won for Inheritance of Loss. This year there are two brown authors, both expats like Desai, on the shortlist: Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Indra Sinha for Animal’s People.

My book is not recommended in-flight reading

The authors on the shortlist this year are unusual. The only big-name author on the list is Ian McEwan, who is on the shortlist for the fifth time (he has won once before). His book On Chesil Beach is less than 200 pages, and therefore would usually have been considered a novella, which would not have been eligible. No other big name author even made the longlist:

When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. [Link]

The remaining four books have sold an average of less than one thousand copies a piece in the UK, so they are hardly popular favorites. Other than On Chesil Beach, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has sold the most copies, with 1,519 books moved, and Animal’s People has sold the least, with only 231 copies sold in the UK, despite the sales boost from longlisting it. [Link]

I once translated the Kama Sutra

Both of the desi authors wrote books anchored in current / historical events that were major international tragedies:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist … explores the conflict experienced by a young Muslim who has been educated in the US, worked on Wall Street and fallen in love with an American woman, who finds himself treated with suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11. [Link]

Animal’s People … draws on the real-life events surrounding the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, seen through the eyes of Animal, a boy whose spine was twisted and so must walk on all fours. When an American, Ellie Barber, arrives to seek justice for the victims, he investigates her motives. [Link]

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Joe Hill and the Jihadis

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The beauty of being an “non exempt employee” is that you work as long as it takes to get the job done. So while the rest of the country was celebrating Labor Day, I was in the office, working more than 14 hours to meet a deadline. Tuesday was the same.

I was driving blearily to work this morning, thinking about the union movement and the 8 hour workday when I heard the news about the latest alleged terror plot in Germany. The name of the group they think is responsible? The Islamic Jihad Union.

It should tell you something about my state of mind that my first reaction was “There is a terrorist union? I wonder what benefits they get?”

This segued into a reverie in extremely poor taste about two Jihadi managers, sitting in Pakistan (where those arrested were allegedly trained), complaining about the new German recruits who came in and unionized their operations.

Manager one: Unions are really playing havoc with our operations. Now they’re asking for 3 suicide bombers when one will do. One to carry the bomb, one to set it off, and another to supervise!

Manager two: Yeah, and if they’re asked to attack after 5PM, they want overtime. They’re demanding 50% more virgins! Their slogan is “fewer hours, more houris!”

Maybe this could be the west’s secret weapon in the “GWOT“: Unionization! “I’m very sorry sir, but this is strictly a union shop. We only accept attacks by unionized terrorists here.” That should slow things down considerably.

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“Exotic Flavor for Flav”

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From Fuerza Dulce comes this video clip of a contestant trying to get on VH1’s Flavor of Love:

I sputtered. I laughed. I frowned. Honestly – I’m confused. It’s a pretty bizarre mish-mash of orientalist cliches, done in a ham handed way. It’s neither hilarious nor completely unfunny, although she does act like she’s in on the joke.

Here’s the question – is Orientalism OK when we do it? Or does one desi’s 15 minutes of fame in brownface make the rest of our lives harder by not just reinforcing these tired tropes, but making them seem OK?

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Ripped Asunder

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India and Pakistan are now 60 years old, as is the bloody partition that created them. My father’s family was caught up in what became arguably the largest mass migration in history: 14.5 million people were moved, roughly the same number in each direction, and somewhere between 500,000 and one million of them died in the process.

Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order [Link]

The management of partition was badly botched; if you think Brownie did a heck of a job, Mounty makes him look like a paragon of engagement and sensitivity. Mountbatten insisted that the partition line be drawn in only six weeks! Think of how slowly the US government moves today, and that will give you a sense of how ridiculous and uncaring that deadline was. The line was drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe; this is what his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, had to say about the process:

“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame – though not the sole blame – for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes. “The handover of power was done too quickly…”

… it was “irresponsible” of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline – despite his protests. [Link]

Mountbatten was a pretty boy from a royal family whose track record during WWII led him to be “known in the British Admiralty as the Master of Disaster.” [Link] His track record in India seems similar – he was charming and glib, but unconcerned about the feasibility of plans or the lives which would be lost.

As Viceroy of India, he advanced the date of independence by nine months (no reason was ever given), making the problems associated with partition worse. Critics argue that he foresaw bloodshed and didn’t want it to happen on British watch; he was willing to make things worse as a form of CYA rather than take responsibility for the situation.

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Money for nothing

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Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler is putting his money where his mouth is. He has just published a book where he makes an argument for how to best help people. Now he wants to follow through and give money to people in India. They don’t have to be engaged in charitable work at all, they just have to do something with it that helps India, and they get the money no strings attached:

2. Send your email to DiscoverYourInnerEconomist@gmail.com. Only emails to this address will be considered. The email must contain the legal name (as documented on ID papers) of a person who will receive the money, his or her state in India, and the city of his or her local Western Union branch. You can be the person yourself, or you can send the information on behalf of someone you know.

3. With your email, send a one sentence proposal of how the money will help India… Proposals of all kinds are eligible, including using the funds to help expand your steel factory, and yes using the money to open a new call center. But you must not give the money to beggars.

4. Only one email per person is allowed.

5. By the end of the week I will send $1000 to India, via Western Union. One person will receive $500, the other recipients will get $100 a piece; I will email the wire numbers to each approved person… If/when Discover Your Inner Economist is published in India, further names will receive transfers. I will send at least the net, post-tax value of my Indian advance. [Link]

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Obama, Osama and Tancredo

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The big news of this morning is that Musharraf has backed down from declaring a state of emergency after flirting publicly with the idea:

Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf, under intense pressure from his own advisers and the U.S. government not to curtail civil liberties, has rejected the option of imposing a state of emergency to deal with a deepening political crisis, top government officials said Thursday. [Link]

Of the reasons offered for why he might declare a state of emergency, my favorite was “It’s Obama’s fault!”

Tariq Azim, the Pakistani information minister, … said some sentiment coming from the United States, including from Democratic presidential hopeful Barak Obama, over the possibility of US military action against al-Qaida in Pakistan “has started alarm bells ringing and has upset the Pakistani public”. [Link]

That’s right – Barack Obama, a presidential candidate who isn’t even the front-runner for his party’s nomination has so scared the Pakistani public that the little General might have to declare a state of emergency to calm things down! I didn’t wanna do it, Ms. Rice, but Obama was gonna make me!

Of course, this excuse is completely bogus. Musharraf’s likely motives for considering a state of emergency were purely domestic: a state of emergency would postpone upcoming elections, and sideline that pesky supreme court before it decides that he cannot be both President and head of the army at the same time. He also could have used rising domestic insecurity, including a wave of suicide bombings, as a pretext, but that would have made him look weak.

Mr. President, there are better scapegoats than Obama. Why not blame the September 11 commission or the Washington Post, both of whom have advocated the same policy ? Or better yet, how about Tom Tancredo who has gone far further than any of the above. If any US Presidential candidate is scaring the Pakistani public, it should be Tancredo:

Tom Tancredo continued to defend his comments that threatening to bomb Muslim holy sites would be the right way to “deter any kind of aggression” from terrorists and said that anyone who wouldn’t do the same “isn’t fit to be president” on Sunday morning. [Link]

If that doesn’t start “alarm bells ringing” I don’t know what will!

Related posts: 1, 2

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Woman on top – is it better?

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On July 25th, Pratibha Patil became India’s first female President. Because the Presidency is largely a ceremonial position, this is less significant than Indira’s ascension to the PM’s throne over 40 years ago.

Patil may be far from an exemplary figure, dogged by a long list of controversies including her advocacy of eugenic sterilization, allegations that she protected her brother from a murder charge, and her habit of speaking to dead people without being Haley Joel Osment, but at least she can do little harm as President.

What interests me more is the general question of whether the gender of a politician matters. Certainly, it’s hard to argue that there was anything about Indira’s reign that would reveal her gender.

However, at least at the village level, there is some compelling evidence that gender does indeed matter, but that female performance is unappreciated. Economists examined the effects of a 1993 constitutional change that reserved one third of village council leader positions (randomly allocated) in Bengal and Rajasthan for women. This is what they found:

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  • Female pradhans spent more on public goods preferred by women. [Link]
  • Female pradhans are objectively better – they provide more public goods, the quality of these goods is at least as good as elsewhere, and villagers are less likely to pay bribes. [Link]
  • Despite that, “voters are less satisfied with the performance of female pradhans than with that of male pradhans in providing all services, including drinking water, for which quantity and quality is objectively better … Surprisingly, those unhappy with women leaders include both men and women, and they blame women even for the service levels of those goods that the GP doesn’t provide.” [Link]

    • That’s right – women’s performance on the job is objectively better, they are less corrupt, but even so male and female voters are less happy with their performance and blame them for things entirely outside their control. While President Patil may have come to disfavor based on her own actions, in general it’s the story of Fred and Ginger for women politicians – they have to do everything that men do, but backwards and in heels.

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    Blame it on the rain

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    Monsoon rains come every year, but the flooding caused by this year’s downpour has been some of the worst in decades for India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

    19 million people have been displaced by the deluge. That’s roughly the entire population of New York State, the 3rd largest state in the union, or around the entire population of Sri Lanka.

    Put another way, these monsoon floods have already produced nineteen times as many refugees as Katrina did. Katrina scattered up to one million Americans, and that was the largest American population displacement in 150 years.

    The biggest danger from the rain isn’t drowning, it’s the disease that it brings once water supplies get contaminated:

    “Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,” … UNICEF’s health chief in India, said in a statement.

    The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters … In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours… [Link]

    The danger is worse because floodwaters have closed the roads to many villages, so aid workers can’t easily distribute food and clean water. The Indian air force has air dropped food for 2 million people in Bihar. This is going to be a serious task, one that will require both government and civil society working together, something they are lousy at doing.

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